


At the End of All Things (What's Another Sin?)

by Ceris_Malfoy



Series: Steter Week 2015 [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: A lot of introspection, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Always Female Stiles Stilinski, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Cohabitation, Dubious Consent, F/M, Full Shift Werewolves, Human Alpha Stiles Stilinski, Implied Mind Rape, Isolation, Misunderstandings, Pack Mother Stiles Stilinski, Steter Week, Steter Week 2.0, Tags may be added, Unreliable Narrator, as a matter of fact, if peeps say i need more, let me know, mentioned bestiality, old school zombies, seriously, steter week 2015, the zombie apocalypse is not the main point of this story, they're barely mentioned, though it's so subtle you really have to read between the lines to see it, unhealthy everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:16:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4273197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceris_Malfoy/pseuds/Ceris_Malfoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first year of her solitary existence had been all about survival.</p><p>The second year was learning how to <i>want</i> to survive.</p><p>And then the wolf arrives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for everyone: This is a heavy story to read. It messed me up a little as I was proof-reading it, which is weird, given the usual kind of shit I write. It is not meant to be a feel-good piece. I am warning you upfront that nothing is okay in this fic, and nothing will ever be okay in this fic. There is no happy ending here. Not really. Not if one stops and thinks about it. 
> 
> On the other hand, I did leave things deliberately open-ended so that you guys could imagine how you want it to end. 
> 
> I give blanket permission right up front for whoever wants to play around in this 'verse. Write your own ending, write Peter's side of things, write all the filthy, nasty werewolf sex that I wanted to but chickened out on. It's all good, as long as some kind of credit is given.

It’s the silence that bothers her.

When the world first went to shit, there had been so much _noise_. Screams and sirens echoed around Beacon Hills for weeks, intertwined with the low-pitched moaning of the undead. For almost two months, there was nothing but the noise of people trying, and failing, to survive.

It wasn’t so bad, those first few weeks. The electricity still worked then, and the internet had still been accessible, and she’d always been a pragmatic girl. Once she realized that things were not likely to get any better, she’d used all the time she had to look up and print out various survival guides. Her dad would help her wade through the things that wouldn’t really pertain to them or things that were flat out bull-shit, but he always ruffled her hair after every new guide they poured over and praised her for her cleverness.

She missed her dad the most.

She’d been thirteen when the dead first started walking the streets. By the three-month marker, all she had was her dad. By the fourth, she was alone.

A group of men, armed and desperate had found her and her dad, and the little haven they had built. The men hadn’t wanted to negotiate, hadn’t wanted to share. They wanted their food and their shelter, and they wanted her – the only living female they had seen in months. She could still remember her dad’s eyes, panicked and desperate. She can still remember the sound of his voice as he screamed for her to run. She can remember the sounds of his shot-gun echoing throughout their house, the heavy thuds of bodies hitting the wooden floors.

She remembers the small horde of the walking dead that had followed the men, the way they shambled forward, and – afterwards – the thick, meaty sounds of flesh being torn from bone.

She remembers her father’s screams.

Stiles is almost sixteen now, tall and lanky and lean with corded muscle, alive when so many were dead.

And she has the Hales to thank for it.

When she was little, before Scott came into her life, she used to play with Cora Hale. They weren’t friends, not in the traditional sense, but their mothers were fond of each other, and the both of them had learned to grin and bear each other for their sakes. The Hales lived deep in the Preserve, and each of the Hale children and Peter, their uncle, had a small tree-house. Stiles had been told by her mother that although Peter had been raised to think of himself as their uncle, because he was so close in age to the three Hale children, Talia often treated all of them the same.

So, there were four little houses, each connected to each other by the clever use of tree-limbs made secure through steel bracers, and no one was allowed access to another’s house without express permission.  Stiles didn’t understand how they could always tell when someone trespassed, but they could, and so the rules usually remained followed.

It’s to those tree-houses she ran to when her father had told her to run.

The zombies weren’t fast, or particularly coordinated. They could shamble up stairs, but not ladders, and while those little houses weren’t designed for permanent living, Stiles suspected she would learn to make do in them.

=

She spends three days curled in a tiny ball, crying, mourning the last of her family, and then she goes to work.

One of the first things she and her father had noticed was that the undead tended to void direct sunlight, and when the sun was highest in the sky, they were almost docile, if not dormant, even when in shadow. This did not mean in any shape or form that they were safe to be around – make enough noise, or fuck up and cut yourself, and the next thing you would hear was the sound of shuffling feet and hungry moans. But still, the best time to be active about hunting down food and water would be in the middle of the day.

She ‘raids’ her house first – gingerly avoiding the decaying remains of the strange men and her father – grabbing every sheet and blanket and pillow she can get her grubby hands on. She grabs her hardiest clothes, and then her father’s. She grabs all the guns and bullets from her father’s safe, the food and bottled water from the pantry, and then the three binders with all her survival guides. And then she raids the neighbor’s houses.

It takes her a week to make a successful (if hella primative) lift, and almost a full month to be haul everything she deems useful or necessary up to the four tree-houses, and then another month or two to decide how to distribute everything.

Cora’s house, the smallest of them, is where she decides to pile up all the pillows and blankets and sheets and sofa cushions into a sort-of ‘nest.’ Laura’s house, the second-largest of them all and the one closest to the ground is where she piles all the weapons, flashlights, batteries, and backpacks. Derek’s house she turns into her pantry. In Peter’s house, the largest of them all, and the only one with any kind of furnishing, she stores everything else.

=

The first year of her solitary existence had been all about survival.

She taught herself to drive using cars stolen from the dead, and eventually grabbed her neighbor’s truck and headed down to home-depot. She grabbed as much as she could: nails and hammers and wood and magazines with do-it-yourself guides to building and gardening. She stole seeds and fertilizers, mulch and gardening tools, and then set about making raised-beds in the clearing beneath her tree-houses. She knew she wouldn’t be able to survive off of canned food forever – and growing veggies was surprisingly easy if she followed the guides. She built herself a fire-pit, and figured out how to repair the roofs of the houses.

She used the library to teach herself how to make traps, stole a neighbor’s gear and taught herself how to fish. She learned through heavy trial and error how to smoke meat to make jerky, how to can and jar or dry her summer and fall harvests so that she would have food during the seasons where game and fish weren’t all that plentiful.

She kept up a strict exorcise routine – mainly focusing on running and swinging a crowbar with deadly intent. But she also practiced carrying firearms and using them while on the move – always unloaded of course. She couldn’t afford to waste her ammunition, but she knew she was a decent shot – her dad had been teaching her how to shoot a gun for almost as long as she could remember.

=

The second year was learning how to _want_ to survive.

No one had ever told Stiles that the mind was a tricky thing. Kept busy, it could be a person’s best friend. She had been too busy learning how to take care of herself, how to do what she needed to do, that she rarely had time to actually think. And more often than not, she’d collapse in her ‘nest’ and pass right out, so tired and worn out from all the physical labor she wasn’t used to performing.

But as the months stretched onwards, as she got more comfortable in her routines, as she became a more successful hunter, the less she needed to go into town on raids, the more time she had to think.

To remember.

She could only take so long of the silence, of the loneliness, before she started not wanting to get up anymore. There were days were she wouldn’t move from her nest at all, not even to get something to drink, only stirring when she needed to relieve herself, never so far gone that she was willing to soil her bedding.

It took her a long time to force herself to go back into town to see if there was a way to keep herself distracted.

Up until then, Peter’s tree-house contained only whatever he’d left in it – a few journals, a couple of books, an old bean-bag chair, and an elegant desk-set that Stiles had wondered more than once how someone had managed to haul it up there.

Over the next few months, Stiles went into town again and again, not for food or weapons or clothes – though if she found them, they did return with her. No. What she brought back were other things. Books, mostly. She ended up raiding an art store, grabbing anything that caught her eye. She found an old Sony Walkman and some headphones, and grabbed every cd she could get her hands on, not to mention batteries. Year’s worth of batteries. She grabbed ipods and tablets and mp3 players, only checking to see what their battery life was, chucking the ones that were already dead, keeping the ones that had some life in them. She took stuffed animals and toys and someone’s old Nintendo gamegear – it was so old, the games were still in monochrome instead of color, but with batteries, it was still functional.

But mostly it was books. Tons and tons of them, stacked everywhere in every corner of Peter’s treehouse.

It helped, but not enough.

=

And then the wolf arrives.

She’s cleaning her first kill of the season – a young buck – when she sees him in the shadows. He’s a large, almost monstrous thing, misshapen and somehow wrong to the eye. But despite his size and the odd way he’s shaped, he’s clearly a wolf. He’s staring at her, blue eyes vivid and bright, teeth bared in a silent snarl.

She’s frozen, unable to breath. There is a very real, primal urge to flee thrumming in her blood, but also too is the intense, insane desire to touch his fur, to see if it’s as soft as it looks. The wolf steps closer to her, closer to the dead buck, and she slowly, carefully backs away. She does not drop the wolf’s gaze, does not run. She just keeps slowly backing away, until finally it is the wolf who drops its gaze as it stalks out of the shadows and settles in to eat her buck.

The last thing she sees before she judges it safe to turn around is the wolf’s bloody muzzle digging some sort of tender organ out of the stomach.

=

She’s more cautious now.

Zombies are one thing – slow and ponderous and dangerous simply through sheer numbers. _Wolves_ are another thing altogether.

Wolves hadn’t been seen in this part of California for almost 60 years, but if this zombie thing is as wide-spread as Stiles sometimes fears it is, then who’s to say that they wouldn’t migrate back? She knows enough from nature documentaries that wolves are inherently pack animals, and that lone wolves are dangerous.

And her wolf is a lone wolf.

She doesn’t see him often, not at first, but she hears him at night, howling at the moon, a sound that is sad and longing.

Sometimes when she’s cleaning a kill, the wolf will come. Always she backs away from him, but after the first few times, she doesn’t leave altogether. The wolf isn’t greedy; he eats his fill and then retreats back into the shadows of the forest. Sometimes they watch each other for long moments, her kill in between them, sometimes he just leaves. The days he doesn’t, he watches her intently as she carefully makes her way back to her kill, watches her as she sets about cutting it up and storing the meat in the metal pot she usually brings alongside her.

=

She dreams, sometimes, of a too-warm body wrapping tight around her. She dreams of lips trailing gently along her neck, of a warm voice whispering words she can’t hear into her hair. She looks forward to these dreams, because for the first time since her daddy died, she feels safe and loved.

=

She wakes up one day and climbs down to tend her garden, and the wolf is there, in the center of the clearing next to her fire-pit, watching her. She bites her lip, contemplates going back up, but if she doesn’t maintain her berries, she risks losing them to bugs and rot. Stiles eyes him for a long time, but all he does is watch her, tail twitching against the dirt.

She eventually turns her back and starts pruning and weeding. By the time she is done, her back hurts and she has a splitting headache, but she still takes the time to gently prod at her various berries, plucking off all the ripe ones that haven’t already been overtaken by ants or wasps.

And the whole time, the wolf just lies there, watching her.

=

She’s crazy, and she knows it.

She drives into town and gets some lumber and more blankets and two giant metal dog bowls. She doesn’t build a dog house, because the wolf isn’t a dog and she's not going to try and insult it by pretending it is one, but she does make a little shanty-like structure that would serve well to keep him out of the rain. She tucks the new blankets underneath, puts water in one of the bowls, and fills the other with cooked fish.

The wolf shows up, eats the fish, snorts at the shelter, and leaves.

=

Sometimes she wakes up with finger-shaped bruises on her hips and her thighs. She stares at them for long, long moments, running her fingers over the discolored flesh, wondering how they got there.

=

She keeps putting meat in the bowl.

=

“Holy shit, dude, it’s a girl!”

Stiles startles, falls to her ass. The basket with her freshly scrubbed bedding falls to the floor, and she mourns the extra wash she’ll need to give them now. She turns gob-smacked eyes to the two men who’d stumbled into her, for a blinding minute so relieved to see another human face that she forgets the danger she’s in.

She doesn’t forget for long.

The way they look at her makes her uncomfortable, makes her insides crawl with disgust and alarms go off in her head. She can almost hear her father’s voice screaming at her to run. She gets up slowly, warily, hand going for the knife she keeps in the back pocket of her jeans. “Just walk away,” she says. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Ah no, baby, don’t be like that,” man number one says, stepping forward. He’s grinning. He's the bigger of the two, but not nearly as muscled as his companion.

“Yeah, swee'eart,” man number two joins in. “We ain’ seen som’in’ as sweet as you in a lon' time.” He's going to be the one to watch for, the one she'll need to take out as fast as possible.

Stiles bares her teeth as she finally gets to her feet. She wishes she’d brought a gun. She grips the knife tighter. She watches them warily. She’s fast, and she knows these woods, but the last thing she wants to do is lead them back to her tree-houses. A zombie couldn’t climb the ladders, but a _man_ could, and in an enclosed space, their sheer size would be enough.

“Come on, baby,” the first man croons. “We’ll make you feel _real_ nice.”

“Real _good_ ,” the other adds.

“How about you go fuck yourselves,” she hisses, backing up. Her eyes dart between the two of them as they move closer.

“Now that’s not nice baby.”

“No’ very nice a’all.”

She tenses, pulling out the knife, waiting.

The two men laugh, apparently highly amused by the sight of a skinny teenager with a knife. 

She fights as best she can as they approach, but regardless of all the hard physical labor she's done, regardless of all the running, of all the practicing, it's not enough. She's still just a frail sixteen-year-old with no actual training in knife-fighting, and these are fully grown men who are clearly used to violence by the way they easily side-step all her desperate swings. One of them manages to get behind her, grabbing her arms and twisting, forcing her to drop the knife or risk her arms being broken.

The other starts unbuckling his belt.

She screams at him, wordless and enraged, terrified and hating, and kicks out, nailing him right in the balls. 

He drops to the ground swearing, and the other man swears with him, swinging her by her arms into a tree. She slams face-first into rough bark, crying out in pain as her nose breaks. He slams her into the tree twice more. "I thin' you're gonna be the sorriest bitch in Cali by the time we're done wit'ch'u." he snarls in her ear. "We was jus' gonna fuck you an' leave you here swee'eart, but now I thin' we're gonna take you back to ours an' le' our buddies have a turn or two, yeah?"

She can't help it. Her vision is blurring and graying out, and all she can do is start crying.

One hand presses her into the tree, while his other is tugging down her jeans and underwear, groping at her ass. She's hyperventilating, almost deliberately, knowing she doesn't want to be conscious for this.

And then there a savage, infuriated roar coming from somewhere behind her, and the last thing she knows before her world goes black is the sound of high-pitched screams.

=

Stiles comes to propped against the tree, nose a sharp but oddly gentle throb in the center of her face, her jeans tugged up as far as they can go with her siting on her ass, her wolf plopped over her outstretched legs, lazily clearing it's chops of blood.

She glances around the clearing, sees the torn, half-eaten bodies of the men who had almost raped her, and busts out into tears again. Later she'll blame shock and trauma for what she does next: she throws her arms around the wolf's neck, buries her face in his surprisingly soft fur, and bawls like a toddler. The wolf growls lowly for several long moments, before huffing and nuzzling against her shoulder. 

=

She's not quite sure how she gets home. She doesn't remember walking through the woods to her clearing, doesn't remember climbing the ladder to her nest, doesn't remember changing her dirty clothes. She definitely doesn't remember setting and splinting her nose, but nonetheless, it's done. 

Her head hurts and her body feels like someone beat her all over, like she should be one giant bruise. There's a snort from beside her, and when she looks to the side, she's surprisingly _un_ -surprised to see her wolf lounging across all her pillows, tail flicking back and forth.

"I don't know how this is possible," she says, voice scratchy from all the abuse she put it through earlier. "But thank you."

=

The wolf follows her everywhere now. 

She doesn't mind him. Finds his company soothing and fascinating. 

She likes having him beside her, likes having something to talk to, to share things with. He may not respond with words, but she can see the almost-human intelligence behind those electric blue eyes, and how every passing day, it seems to her more and more like the wolf is less a feral animal and more a man trapped in an animal's body. It is fantasy, she thinks, the isolation getting to her, making her desperate, making her see things that aren't actually there. She knows that one day, sooner or later, she will forget entirely that this is a wild animal, and that she will mess up and do the wrong thing, and get bit - or killed - for it. 

She also doesn't care.

Maybe it's the isolation, maybe it's the strange dreams she's been having. Maybe she's always been a little broken inside, and this is just the first time she's seriously noticed it. But she knows that wolves can't climb ladders, and somehow or another, whenever she wakes up, he's curled up right beside her. Night after night, rain or not.

It's nice.

=

She dreams of strong arms and sharp teeth, of safety and protection. She dreams of fur and skin, of a low, growling voice whispering in her ear the same three words, over and over again.

_"Beautiful. Want. Mine."_

 


	2. Peter and the Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wolf watches and waits.
> 
>  
> 
> For what, he doesn’t exactly know.
> 
>  
> 
> Peter stirs at times, watching through the wolf’s eyes, occasionally prodding the wolf into action. This is how the girl first sees him – he walks into a small clearing where she is digging into the gut of a young buck, drawn partially by hunger, partially by the curiosity the human in him is radiating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick blurb I wrote a little while ago. 
> 
> I definitely have plans to continue this, but it will take a while. 
> 
> Love you all!

Peter doesn’t know how long it is before he starts to regain human consciousness.

 

He does know he is awake; alive and relatively well, if one calls being trapped in the form of a larger-than-normal wolf well. He remembers being awake and aware and in control, and then, well, it gets fuzzy after that.

 

The fire broke him in some ways, he knows, the abandonment by what remained of his pack shattered what little was left, and he just …went away. He let his pain and rage and sense of loss enfold him into a dark void within his ashen heart and allowed his misery to drag him deeper and deeper into the abyss. He lingered in a mentality that was not that of a human or a wolf; nor was he even anything in-between. He was just a hollowed-out shell of a man, staring at his ceiling, noting only in the vaguest sense the passing of time and the healing of his shell.

 

He will never be able to put into words the blinding agony of healing cell-by-cell, all alone with the raging void where his pack should have been.

 

He drifts for a long time.

 

He might be drifting even still, had it not have been for his nurse abruptly deciding that he would make a good midnight snack. He only vaguely remembers her teeth chomping through the scar-tissue on his right arm, digging deep. He remembers the pain, the incredulous – and very brief – return to his human senses, before the wolf in him rose up and took over.

 

He let it.

 

What need had he for a human form or senses? He had no pack to love or hate, and a pack-less werewolf was a dead werewolf, hunted by humans and other wolves alike, not to mention the creepier things that went bump in the night. It would be easier to survive if he disappeared into the wilds of the preserve as nothing but a wolf.

 

And so he does.

 

\------

 

He is not unaware, not exactly, but everything is simpler as a wolf than as a human. Time really holds no meaning; there is no tomorrow, no years-from-now, no real thought of what comes next or what the consequences of his actions might be. A lot of his very basic nature that condemned him as some sort of villain in his sister’s eyes now made perfect and absolute sense.

 

To Peter, there was both yesterday and tomorrow to consider, but to the wolf, there is only now.

He hunts when he is hungry, plays when he is feeling mischievous, dens when he is tired, and runs the length of his chosen territory to make sure nothing else trespasses.

 

It is a simple life, and as time passes, he loses the part of him that was once human. He has no name, no past. He is a wolf, nothing more, nothing less, and were it not for the girl, he would be as such until the day he died.

 

\---

 

The _girl_.

 

Woman-child.

 

Beta.

 

 _Mate_.

 

The wolf scents her first as he prowls closer and closer to the former Hale lands, closer to the scents of ash and death and pain that he’s so-far avoided because it makes something inside him howl with remembered hurt. He watches her for days, creeping along on silent feet. He watches her as she kills prey and strips it of meat. He watches as she fiddles around in the dirt beneath her den – _gardening_ , the human part of him murmurs sleepily.

 

He likes her scent – wild and natural, with none of the fake chemical fragrances _Peter_ remembers females prefer. She smells like the woods after a good rain, of pine and cedar, and, vaguely, of half-remembered pack.

 

The human in him, mostly forgotten and not really missed, stirs restlessly, drawn by the lingering scent. The wolf doesn’t fight it. He knows better than the human, knows that they are only at their best when they are one. He knows that though the consciousness that identifies itself as _Peter_ is too hurt to _want_ to live, eventually they will be one and the same again.

 

And he knows the girl is the key.

 

\------

 

The wolf watches and waits.

 

For what, he doesn’t exactly know.

 

 _Peter_ stirs at times, watching through the wolf’s eyes, occasionally prodding the wolf into action. This is how the girl first sees him – he walks into a small clearing where she is digging into the gut of a young buck, drawn partially by hunger, partially by the curiosity the human in him is radiating.

 

She freezes, beta-gold eyes alert and wary, but she does not look away. Not even as she backs away from the kill does she drop her gaze.

 

The human calls her foolish, the wolf thinks otherwise. He _likes_ the gift of freshly killed meat, admires the skill and cunning with which it was brought down – obviously so swiftly that the meat had no time to be soured by the buck’s terror – and delights in the boldness with which the other beta dared meet his gaze.

 

The human shrugs and goes back to sleep.

 

The wolf thinks he’ll watch the girl some more. Good mates are hard to come by, and he thinks she’ll do quite nicely.


	3. Argents and Hales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chris Argent rolls into town with his daughter, and meets Stiles.
> 
>  
> 
> _Set 4-5 years after the first chapter._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one ends on a more lighter note, I think. Still a bit horrible, because Zombie Apocalypse, but not altogether dark and gloomy.

Chris wipes his brow as he stops, wiping off the sweat built up over 6 hours of hard labor.

This little town is empty, for the most part, one or two small packets of survivors taking refuge in areas here and there, but for the most part, everything is unoccupied. It’s a quaint little town, ransacked the same way most towns and cities have been over the years, but it has a good climate year-round and a large enough forest to support game. The other survivors pretty much stick to their own. Except for when they first rolled into town, no one spoke to him or approached him.

It’s the way he likes it, if he’s honest.

He glances around, spotting Allison up in a tree with her bow, keeping watch for him. He smiles, as much as he is able to smile these days. She’s a brave girl, and he’s so proud of her that sometimes it hurts.

Sighing, he turns back to his project: a greenhouse. It’s almost done, but the hardest part is getting the glass panes set up. It used to be, back in the day, that he’d have machinery or at least a task force of helping hands to help him. Nowadays though, he wouldn’t trust a pair of helping hands if his life depended on it. He’d learned that lesson well enough with Victoria.

He has to stop again and breathe past the deep well of grief that still clenches his heart. No one who had ever viewed them together would have been able to tell, the both of them private and reserved in their affections, but Chris had genuinely loved his wife. Had adored her, really. The loss of her would have been the end of him, were it not for Allison and the thought of what could happen to her in this new world they lived in.

Who could have ever thought that werewolves would be the least of his worries?

Indeed, in his travels across the US with Allison, it had been the supernatural that had remained the most humane. Suspicious and ever-wary of strangers, but they did what they could for those passing through. Human’s, on the other hand, well. He only had to look at what had happened to his wife as an answer to that one.

Sighing again, he decides he’s done enough for the day. They had plenty of food left, they’d be fine for another year or two while he tried to get this finished. “Allison!” he calls, and watches as she immediately shimmies down the tree.

“Are we going hunting soon?” she asks him, eyeing his greenhouse a little dubiously.

Chris is hesitant about hunting. The other survivors have warned him out of the woods, telling him that no one ever comes back once they reach the old Hale grounds.

He knows what the Hales were. How could he not, with what his sister had done? The thought of there being a survivor, feral with rage and no pack bonds to speak of, makes him uneasy. Allison doesn’t know, even now, about what their family used to do. He and Victoria kept that from her, especially when their survival used to depend on the very creatures they used to hunt. He and Victoria had argued long over that, but the decision to let Allison grow without the prejudice they had both grown up with, to let her see and judge each person by their own actions had been a battle he’d won.

“Dad?”

Chris shakes himself out of his thoughts. “Sorry, honey. Got lost for a bit.” He smiles at her. “We’ll go out this weekend,” he tells her.

She smiles back.

“Go on and get some rest. I’ve got first watch.”

She kisses his cheek and smiles again at him, turning and heading into the house they’ve claimed as theirs.

He eyes the sun and heads in after her.

Small town though it may be, there was always the dead to consider. It was best to be inside before the light failed.

++++

Allison is hunting in the southernmost side of the forest, as far away from the Hale lands as he can get her. She had protested the separation, of course, it going against everything he’s ever taught her about surviving in these times, but Chris was adamant about scoping the place out before letting her join him.

He’d not have her death on his hands.

He’s careful about his movements, making sure to stay downwind as he approaches. He has no wolfsbane, no silver, no mountain ash. He hasn’t handled that stuff in years, and hopes that by now, the scent of his former profession has left him completely.

He stops at the sounds of something moving, swiftly, carelessly, through the brush. He keeps his breathing shallow, crouches down, steadies himself against a tree to prevent involuntary movement do to muscle cramps, and watches.

Chris has to blink however, when what races through the trees is a child, a little girl. 3 or 4, if he had to guess. He shakes his head, wonders idly if there’s a third survivor group that he’s missed. Shortly after, another child streaks through the trees in clear pursuit. Not older, not younger, same coloration. Twins perhaps? Cousins born in the same year maybe?

He waits. Listens.

There’s a splash, and two sets of giggles echoing around the forest. Laughter, sweet and innocent. He closes his eyes. He hasn’t heard anything that carefree in years.

He opens them again, and stills.

A wolf is sitting in front of him, head cocked. He’s an over-sized, ragged, heavily scarred thing, flesh puckered and twisted all down his right side, fur growing in raggedy clumps along the mass of scar tissue. Chris knows him. Knows those blue-blue-blue eyes watching him, waiting for him to make a move.

Peter Hale.

Christ. He closes his eyes again. Of all the Hales to be here, alive, it had to be this one. Vindictive and ruthless even as a small boy, Peter had grown up to be his sister’s enforcer, and he’d been scarily effective at his job. He’s no expert, but he’s more than certain that surviving the fire the way he had had done his personality absolutely no favors.

“What do we have here?”

Chris opens his eyes again, looks at the girl who is standing next to the wolf. She is young, about the same age as Allison, give or take a few years. But her amber eyes are hard and cold in a way that Allison’s weren’t. There’s a gun in her hand and several knives strapped to her body, and Chris can tell through her clothes that her whip-cord thin frame is mostly muscle.

A fighter then.

She has her free hand resting lightly on the wolf’s head.

“Well then?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, standing slowly, bringing his hands up, palms out, showing he has no weapons in his hands. “I didn’t mean to trespass if this is your land. I’ve just arrived in town with my daughter a week or so ago.”

The girl doesn’t blink. Neither does the wolf.

“You were warned off,” she says bluntly.

Chris sighs. “Yes, but the day I listen to random strangers when they give me ‘advice’ is the day I know I’ve finally gone senile.” It’s not the truth. Not entirely.

The wolf growls.

“Lie,” the girl says. “Tell me the truth, and maybe I’ll let you walk away. Lie to me again, and you’ll get a bullet through the brain for your trouble.”

Chris looks at the wolf, looks back at her. “This is Hale land,” he says softly. “My sister committed a crime against the Hales, nearly killed them all. I wanted to know which of them survived, that the locals were adamant about not coming near. I wanted to…” he trails off, because he doesn’t know what he wanted, not really. To make sure that nothing would harm his daughter, certainly, but …

The guilt of what Kate had done still ate at him some nights. The Hales had been a peaceful pack. They had kept to themselves and dealt with supernatural trouble-starters quickly and quietly. They hadn’t deserved what had been done to them.

“Argent,” the girl said softly. Her grip tightened on the gun.

“I am not a hunter, and neither is my daughter,” he tells her.

The wolf is silent.

The girl nods once, sharply. “Don’t come back.”

They both head the same way the children went, side by side.

Chris turns and leaves.

+++++

He sees her every now and then around town. She usually sticks to the suburban areas closest to the Preserve, but occasionally he bumps into her in the long-abandoned Home Depot.

Sometimes, the other survivors see her as well.

Most of them are men. It’s a sad fact of life that when the world first went to shit, 70% of the women and children were the first to die – the women being too emotionally soft, overweight, or just plain untrained. The men fared better, for the most part, but the untrained and overweight still died right alongside them. Those that were left fell into one of two categories: men like Chris, who just wanted to see his live another day and would do whatever it took to see it happen, and men like those who’d killed his wife, hardened and ugly inside and out.

One group of survivors in Beacon Hills is made up of the former. There are 6 adults (5 men and 1 woman) and 3 children (2 teenagers, one toddler). The men are fiercely protective, the woman doubly so. They don’t welcome Chris or Allison into their community, but they do agree to meet and trade once a month, which is more than Chris thought he’d get out of them.

The second group, well. Chris feels no guilt about telling Allison to shoot first and shoot again, no questions asked, if she ever sees one approaching her. 7 men, each armed and dangerous. Chris sees them, every now and then, coming back into Beacon Hills with the spoils they’ve rummaged from other small surviving communities. Sometimes those spoils included women.

Usually they included children.

It disgusted him, but Chris was a realist. He wouldn’t be able to take them all on. The best he would be able to do is take out half of them before he was killed himself, leaving Allison to take the brunt of their anger. So he does as everyone else does – he ducks his head and tries to ignore the screams of pain that occasionally echo through the empty town.

The girl doesn’t come out too often from her forest. When she does, she’s always alone. Chris takes to watching her, watching over her, because he’s seen the looks. Even from the community he trades with, the men watch her with hungry eyes.

It’s not about attraction, not completely. The girl is undoubtedly attractive – those amber eyes and plush lips and pale, smooth skin all give her a fey appearance that is not without its appeal. The vast majority of it seems to stem from the fact that she appears to be almost feral. Her movements are honed, steady, feet sure in their every placement, a prowling, dangerous sway to her hips. She wields her weapons with pin-point accuracy and minimalist movement, striking quick, precise, and lethal.

They want to tame her, want to own her, want to be the one to see all that deadly grace come undone. It’s rare to see a girl her age not beaten down and cowering in fear, or a jaded, twisted creature left only with their hate and their will to survive at all costs. Hell, even Chris feels the urge sometimes when he sees her – a deep, almost primal need to _claim_.

But Chris has long experience ignoring that part of him. Even if he didn’t, Allison would surely kick his ass back into gear.

+++

He waves her over one day. She eyes him warily, glancing around, likely determining if this was some sort of ambush.

Chris doesn’t find fault in this. In fact, he feels the same rush of pride in her that he gets when Allison shows the same sort of common sense.

She ambles over, one hand on her gun, and remains out of arms reach.

Chris tosses a bag over to her. It’s not much, but he couldn’t get those two children out of his mind. He watches as she toes open the bag, watches her freeze when she sees the teddy bears inside. Her face does something complicated, expressions flashing across them far too fast for Chris to process.

“Why?” she finally asks.

Chris shrugs. “I heard their laughter – carefree and joyous. I haven’t heard a child sound like that since before the Resurrection.”

The girl’s face twists. “None of my neighbors had kids; I was already almost a teen when it happened.”

It doesn’t click for him at first, but then it does: she hadn’t been able to find toys for them. “Are they yours?” he asks.

She is silent for a long moment, eyes locked on the bears at her feet. “Yes,” she finally says.

“I know you don’t trust me, I know your wolf would rather see every Argent dead,” he tells her. “But if you need something that is too far out for you to forage for, I’ll try to find it.”

Her gaze moves to him, amber eyes wide and slightly teary, but no less cautious. “Why? What do you want from me?”

Chris shakes his head, backs up. “I want nothing from you. I…” he pauses, trying to find the correct words. “I have a daughter; I know what it’s like to want the best for your children. I know the shame that eats at you when you can’t give it to them. This world is shit, the vast majority of the people left are shit, but for them, we keep trying.” He tries to smile at her. “I wouldn’t say no to a bit of trade, if your wolf is agreeable, but I won’t hold these kind of things hostage – if I find them and you want them, they’re yours.”

She finally picks up the bag. She’s tense, but when she next looks at him, her eyes are not so wary. “Thank you,” she says softly.

“My name is Chris Argent, and my daughter is Allison.” He holds out his hand in the universal sign of handshaking, idly feeling embarrassed about it, but doing it all the same.

She twitches, almost like she’s going to break for it, before one pale, slim hand settles cautiously in his. “I’m Stiles,” she says.

They shake, and, haltingly, Stiles smiles.

++++

Several months later, Allison is with him for the first time. His daughter is practically vibrating with excitement – so eager to meet another girl so close to her age. They both have bags set aside. Canned food and medicine for children that hadn’t yet expired, plus a few more stuffed animals. Chris is especially proud of the set of primers he found in the old Elementary school the next town over – considering the fact that Beacon Hills Elementary had apparently been burned to the ground alongside half of the eastern district during the early days, he doubts Stiles has found children-appropriate learners.

Stiles asked him to meet at a specific housing block close to the edge of Hale lands for this first meeting between families. He largely suspects Stiles had grown up here, especially when a brief look around shows the entire neighborhood to have been ransacked of everything even remotely useful. The ease she shows when she finally approaches, tugging a small wagon behind her, accompanied by her wolf and two grinning toddlers riding on his back further proves this theory – this is her territory, and she feels safe enough here.

Allison’s breath catches, and Chris takes her hand in his and squeezes once. She glances at him and he shakes his head. He’ll explain later.

“Stiles,” he calls.

“Chris,” she calls back. She’s smiling this time, bright and sunny and _happy_. The two toddlers echo her greetings, laughing merrily.

Stiles pulls her wagon closer; her wolf, however, hangs back. The children don’t leave his back, content to sit and watch their mother, well behaved in a way that tells Chris that they are more than likely going to mature into werewolves, listening to Stiles as if she is the alpha of their small pack, human though she may be.

Chris nudges his daughter, helps her gather all the bags, and meets the girl half-way.

“Stiles, this is Allison. Allison, this is Stiles.”

“Hi,” Allison chirps out.

Stiles eyes her for a long moment before smiling as well. “It’s good to meet you.” She waves absently back at her family. “Those are my twins – Luke and Leia – and my mate, Peter.”

Chris quirks an eyebrow. Allison is too young to know the reference, not having seen the films before the world went to shit, but he does. “Really?” he asks drily. “Didn’t your wolf have something to say about that?”

Stiles flashes a bright, mischievous grin at him. “I don’t speak wolf, Chris. If he’d wanted me to name them something else, he should have shifted and opened his mouth.”

Chris tenses, but luckily Stiles had already started opening the bags to see the bounty Chris and Allison had found for her. Allison shoots him a confused look.

“He doesn’t shift often then?” he asks, trying for nonchalant. He doesn’t know how old Stiles was when she was left on her own, he doesn’t know how much she actually knows about wolf culture, and he definitely doesn’t want to start something if there’s nothing actually wrong. But the way she said that …

Stiles laughs again. “Good heavens no. It took me for _forever_ to figure out he was anything other than a particularly clever wolf.”

Chris counts to ten. “How did you find out?”

Stiles shrugs. “Hard not to when you discover that you’re pregnant and you know for a fact you’ve never slept with a human male. For all that my father believed in God and Jesus, immaculate conception isn’t actually something that can happen to us regular mortals.” It’s said drily.

Chris wishes he had wolfsbane so he could shove it down Peter’s throat.

“He mated you and you didn’t _know?_ ” Allison bursts out, eyes wide.

Stiles freezes, turns her head slowly and looks at them both, amber eyes wide and confused. “You’re upset,” she says slowly. “Why are you upset?”

Chris breathes in, counts to ten again. “Stiles, perhaps we just don’t have the full picture,” he starts slowly. “But from what we’re hearing, you were essentially raped.”

Stiles’ gaze darkens, and she stands slowly, the small stuffed cat she was holding falling down to land in the dirt. “Excuse me?”

It’s Allison who continues. “You didn’t know he was a shifter, and you turned up mysteriously pregnant.”

Stiles’ gaze is 9 shades of unfriendly. “And you immediately jump to rape as an explanation?” She snorts, folds her arms, raises her head in a defensively proud gesture. “I didn’t know he was a shifter. I _did_ know he was a wolf when I took him to my bed and allowed him to fuck me full.” She smiles, baring teeth. “The only surprise was when I realized I’d been thoroughly bred. I was reading Greek myths for _weeks_ , convinced either myself or my wolf was some sort of divine being to be able to breed successfully across species, before Peter finally managed to shift. He still can’t manage it often or for long, but he’s getting better.”

Allison can’t hide the disgust on her face. Despite the way she’s grown up, knowing pack laws and practices as well as the back of her own hand, at peace with them the way that Chris will never be, there are still certain prejudices that she’d managed to pick up from her mother. Laying with a shifter in wolf form, knowingly or not, was something Allison would never understand, just as she would never understand how someone could ever lay with what they thought was an animal to begin with. She opens her mouth, but Chris is faster.

“Allison,” he snaps, and at his tone, she shuts her mouth immediately. She looks at him, confused again. “Head back home, Allison,” he says.

“But dad – ”

“Now.”

Chris doesn’t feel disgust. He grew up with those same prejudices, but he’s also older, and more understanding of the depths people would sink to in their loneliness. He doesn’t know how old she is, not really, and he doesn’t know how long she’d been alone. He doesn’t know a lot of things, but he’s glad his image of Peter Hale raping this girl as she slept was not something that was truth. “I’m sorry,” he says immediately once Allison is gone. “I should not have inferred.”

Stiles looks at him, smiles again. “It is an easy mistake to make? Most would not willingly lay with an animal, I think.”

It is the way she says that last part, like she’s not quite sure what most would willingly do, that makes Chris sad and tired and feeling his age. “How young were you when –” he can’t finish it, can’t get the words out of his mouth. It’s a highly personal thing to ask.

“When I was left on my own?” she asks him, tone light.

He nods.

“13 going on 14. Peter came to me when I was 15 or so.”

So young.

She turns back to the bags, picks up half of them and heads over to the wagon. She comes back with three boxes. He knows from prior trades that they are full of preserved fruits and salted meats. He still hasn’t managed to get his greenhouse going.

She leaves the other bags where they are.

“Stiles,” he calls when she’s halfway back to her wolf.

He watches as she stops and looks over her shoulder. “I’m glad you’re not alone now.” Chris is the most sincere he's ever been in his life, he thinks. Somehow this wary girl managed to become as if another daughter to him, and he's honestly happy that she is.

She smiles at him, soft and genuine, nods.

Chris watches as the wolf pads up to her, sniffing and circling, rubbing at her side. The children reach up with grabby hands and pleading eyes, and he watches as Stiles coos at them, leaning down and pressing noses and giving them Eskimo kisses, radiating nothing but pure joy when they shriek with delight. Chris watches them all leave, wolf and girl and their two merry little children.

The Hales had been decimated thanks to his sister, but he thinks under Stiles' watchful eye, this new generation will grow up strong. 

For the first night in a long time, he sleeps easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the main thing people seemed to ask me when they proof-read this chapter was: "you do know that all men aren't rapists at heart, right?"
> 
> And I do. Not all men are rapists. Not all men turn to violence as their first option.
> 
> But this fic, like most well-written apocalypse stores are about more than anything, is about the disintegration of society. It's about primal fears and primal urges, about instinct and what isolationism can do to people. News flash: it isn't pretty. The Walking Dead conveys a lot of it a lot better than I ever could: you have decent people, just trying to survive, just trying to live another day and keep their loved ones safe, and then you have the other side of humanity: cold, cruel, and vicious. People go feral, turn to cannibalism when they're hungry and there is nothing else to eat, turn to rape when they want to fuck but have no willing partners, turn to murder and theft when they see another has what they want. 
> 
> So yes, in this fic there are two types of men: decent sorts like Chris, and men who rape.


End file.
